I have a 500 GB hard drive which I previously attached to my Mac. I detached the drive without going through the eject procedure. When I did this a message showed up, which of course I did not read. I could not use the drive until I formatted again. Now, when I attach the drive it says it is formatted NTFS and has 280.39 of 500 GB free. When I open the drive in Windows Explorer, Finder, or in Linux, is only shows a handful of files totaling 54 MB. How can I find out what is taking up all the space.

2 Answers
2

You will see all files on the volume (including ones that begin with .) sorted from the largest to smallest. The "." and ".." entries in this mode are misleading as they represent the current working directory and the parent. Ignore them.

I'm not so sure of that. He said Explorer says 280.39 of 500. If it was another partition it would only show the size of the partition, not the size of the drive.
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Jeff F.Jan 10 '11 at 20:57

He should check for hidden files then. Probably dot files (files starting with a .). If the original author is using Windows, then the Folder Option to view hidden files will need to be turned on. Under Linux, use ls -la in a terminal window (actually the same for the Mac as well if I recall correctly).
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MikeJan 10 '11 at 21:09